archiveishiuchi

Miyako Ishiuchi, YOKOSUKA STORY #98, 1976-77 Gelatin-silver print 405 x 540mm © Miyako Ishiuchi.

The Work of Miyako Ishiuchi Receives First Showing in the West

Foam_ Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Keizersgracht 609
+31 (0)20 551 6500
Amsterdam
Miyako Ishiuchi
Photographs
1976-2005
September 19-
November 16, 2008

While Miyako Ishiuchi brought attention to herself at Biennial 2005 in Venice with her collection Mother’s, the remainder of her work had not yet been presented collectively in Europe. Exhibited in Foam are ninety photographs from the series Yokosuka Story, Apartment, Endless Night, 1.9.4.7, 1906 to the Skin, and Mother’s from the period 1976-2005. In conjunction, a book is being published by Manfred Heiting.
In several of the exhibited series, Miyako Ishiuchi pays tribute to the beauty of the human body. She notices the worn soles of the feet, telling life’s tale of her subject. Another important theme consists of empty houses, the abandoned interiors which reveal traces of human fates. Among other things, Ishiuchi’s work is interesting for the western viewer in its respect for age. She finds beauty in places where we typically would not look.

It is the first time images from the series Mother’s (2000-2005), 1906 To the Skin (1991-1993) and Yokosuka Story (1976-1977) have been shown in Britain. Curated by Dutch photographer and Japanese photography specialist Machiel Botman, the exhibition was organized and produced by Langhans Galerie Praha, a non-profit organization for the promotion of photography, and will be accompanied by the limited edition book MIYAKO ISHIUCHI, edited by Machiel Botman and published by Manfred Heiting. Printed in the form of a leporello within a slipcase, the book is available exclusively from Michael Hoppen Gallery.

Miyako Ishiuchi was born in 1947 to a country whose culture had been infiltrated by the influence of the US servicemen living on the naval bases in major ports and cities during the military occupation post World War II. The presence of the western soldiers had a profound effect on Ishiuchi’s early childhood, and inspired her to produce her first body of work- Yokosuka Story. Miyako Ishiuchi was one of a renowned group of Japanese photographers, including Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama who confronted the trauma of post-war Japan and the dawning of a new era by using their cameras as tools to express, record and explore what it meant to be Japanese at this pivotal moment in history. Her work is much admired by both her mentors.

Ishiuchi has produced cohesive bodies of photographic work since the late 1970s. Her first book was Yokosuka Story, a study of the port city in the Nitta District, Gunma where she grew up. The city housed a US navy base, and though the images of run down streets and derelict buildings are largely unpopulated, they resonate with the soldiers and civilians who once lived there. The photographer's simple, stoically unsentimental pictures are both striking and relevant; they portray the devastating memories inherent in postwar Japanese reality with an active pathos rather than from an angrily confrontational perspective.

In 1906 to the skin, Ishiuchi creates portrait of Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, who was born in 1906. For this unusual exploration of a man, Ishiuchi turns her attention to human skin –studying Ohno’s scars and the effects of aging on his body, the patina of which convey a person’s history. No shot captures his face or personality; instead the series is an intimate study of the strength and vulnerability of a man through close up images of his skin. The results are celebratory and full of warmth. Ishiuchi says: “His skin is unusually beautiful. It is smoother than silk, warmer than wool, suppler than cotton, stronger than canvas.”

Ishiuchi’s work is included in many important museum collections in Japan and America, but it was with Mother’s that she was chosen to represent Japan at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

She began to photograph her mother systematically and intimately in the last years of her life until 2000, when she died suddenly. Although their relationship had been strained, Ishiuchi was deeply affected. She proceeded to document her mother's possessions in order to come to terms with her death, and in an attempt to understand the bond between them. After her husband was reported missing in World War II, Ishiuchi’s mother had earned her living as a truck driver. When she became pregnant by another man, her first husband suddenly reappeared. Divorce followed a week before Ishiuchi was born.

The objects documented tell the story of a fashionable and resilient woman; elegant close-ups of intimate personal effects- make up, hairbrushes and underwear that still bear the evidence of recent use, showing a life that was painful but not without beauty.

In 2006 Ishiuchi was awarded the prestigious Japan Photographic Society Prize, and in recent years has had solo shows at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as representing Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

After Foam, the exhibition travels to the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London (November 2008- January 2009) and to La Filature, Scène national-Mulhouse.